“You’re a good cop, Molly. You’ve got to know there are also bad ones.”

There, it was out on the table, she thought. It was what she had been fishing for—support for her only theory. Malloy and Bancroft had friends in bad places—and if they did, then it was entirely possible that other cops did as well.

There had just been too many at that bombing scene, she thought again.

“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I like the Mercado angle for this, too. Who else could they have been hooked up with?” She refused to think of Danny when she said it.

“The Mercados are our resident bad guys,” Harrison agreed. He snapped the locks on his briefcase.

He left and Molly sat down at the crime book desk, rubbing her forehead. It was nice to know that someone as powerful as Spence Harrison didn’t think she was nuts for her theory. But she still had questions. Who had supplied Bancroft with the belt he’d looped around his neck? Had Bancroft requested it? Or had someone convinced him that he wanted it?

Molly rose from the table suddenly. She left the war room and went to the records department.

Ten minutes later she had a copy of the official visitors log from the cell area for the day Bancroft had been brought in. She ran down the list of the man’s visitors as she stood in the corridor. Some list. She was the only one on it.

No attorney? Why hadn’t Bancroft called for legal counsel? Those sharks could be counted on to show up before the key turned in the lock.

She hadn’t supplied Bancroft with the belt. Therefore, Molly thought, someone else had visited Bancroft without being signed in. Which meant that whoever had been on desk duty that day hadn’t made an issue of the belt-carrying visitor. Whoever had been on the desk had just waved the visitor in. Because it was another cop?

Her stomach shifted. She’d have to check with personnel to find out who had worked the holding cell area during that shift.

She already knew from the autopsy report that Bancroft hadn’t been dead long when she’d found him. She’d gotten him down and had started CPR herself, to no avail. Bancroft had still been warm. His mysterious visitor could have been there within half an hour of her own sign-in.

Molly started to head back to the war room, then she hesitated. Don’t do it, don’t do it, an inner voice warned her. She stepped back into the records room. “I also need the file on a six-year-old convenience store hold-up.”

“Got a number? An exact date?” the clerk asked. She was a pretty, lithe, young blonde named Gale Howard. Most of the guys loved her.

“No, just a name. Daniel Gates.”

“I should be able to find it. Hold on,” Gale said. “Sign another request for me and I’ll go look.”

And stop running my name through the system. Danny’s voice shot back into Molly’s mind like acid, seeming to singe the edges of everything it touched. “Go away,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head. You’re messing with my kids at that center. I have a right to know.”

“Were you talking to yourself?” Gale asked, returning with the file.

“Uh, no. Well, not really.” Molly took the file and stepped away from the desk.

At some point or other, the store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk would have to leave the center, she decided, returning outside to her car. He couldn’t stay there twenty-four hours a day, could he? She decided to swing by the place again.

His car was still in her space. That was when Molly got her brainstorm. She went back to the police station and found Joe Gannon in the detective’s bureau. She told him what she needed. She could do it herself, but she would probably be questioned by the brass over it.

“What’s this about?” he asked, scowling.

“I volunteer there.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. But that’s not a no-parking zone, is it?”

“Not unless we decide to make it one.”

“On what grounds?”

Molly thought about it. “That building is a firetrap.”

“Close to it, but it must have passed code or the fire department would have shut them down a long time ago.”

Ron was going to kill her for this. Still, principle was principle. And she wouldn’t be able to park there anymore, either, would she? Plus, it really would make the building safer. “We should probably have a clear path to the front door for…you know, firefighters. Just in case.”

“What the hell are you up to?” Gannon was staring at her as though trying to find the answer in her eyes, then he scratched his temple. “Okay. Who cares? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“So do I. I just want to start with the minnows.”

“You’re going to owe me for this.”

“I always pay my debts, Joe.”

“A six-pack. Any import.”

“Consider it done.”

He nodded, then he called in the tow order for the ugly lemon Dodge in front of the rec center. “I’ll have a temporary No-Parking sign there by nightfall.”

It didn’t seem possible to Danny that seventeen kids in any given city in modern America could not own gym shoes. Granted, the rec center families were mostly impoverished. But Anita’s tattoo, Cia’s leather and Lester’s boots had all cost money, so the kids were finding it somewhere.

He was being played for a chump, Danny decided. And where had these other eleven kids’ names come from, anyway? There’d only been six teenagers here yesterday.

“You,” he said to Jerome, “had sneaks on yesterday.” He sat at Ron Glover’s desk facing the boy who stood on the other side of it.

“They got stole last night.”

“Stolen.”

“What, now you’re an English teacher?”

“Whatever I have to be, pal, to get you into college.”

That broke Jerome up. “Me? Yeah, right.”

“You. Right.” Danny looked down at the handwritten list. At least the kids had sent Jerome back with it. That was something. Actually, it was more than he had hoped for. “Okay, here’s the deal.”

“I don’t do deals, man.”

He caught the boy’s gaze and held it. “My guess is that you do deals every day, just not with the likes of me. Now where was I? Right. I’m going to leave here and buy gym shoes for everybody who was here yesterday. These other eleven kids—whoever they hell they are—are going to have to make an appearance and personally request their own pair—after they’ve practiced with us at least five times.” In the meantime, Danny realized, he was going to have to try his hand at a little fund-raising. They’d need uniforms, too, and various other equipment, not all of which could come out of his limited bank account.

“Man, that’s lame,” Jerome complained.

Danny stood from the desk.

“Hey, what did you do time for, anyway?” the boy asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell us.”

Danny paused on his way to the door. He’d known it was coming and had already determined to be honest with these kids. He had a halfhearted hope that some of them might learn from his experience. “Money,” he told him. “They said I stole money.”

Jerome didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, so you got plenty, right? You can buy us all shoes.”

“If I had money to buy you all shoes, would I be driving that scrap of metal out there at the curb?”

“Ain’t no scrap of metal there now, dude.”

“Sure, there is. Right out front.”

“Uh-uh. No more.”

Then, somehow, Danny knew.

He shot around the desk, opening Ron’s office door hard enough and fast enough to make it crack against the wall like a gunshot. He heard Jerome laughing behind him as he jogged outside.

His car was gone.

Danny drove his fist against a stop sign. The metal clanged. Then he realized that he was still holding the piece of paper with the shoe sizes. Swearing, he shoved it down into his jeans pocket and headed back to the center to call—again—for a cab.

He was going to kill her.

When Molly arrived at the center at two o’clock, the space in front of the center walkway was vacant. There was a no-parking sign there. She grinned to herself and started scouting around the block for another space. She found the Dodge around the first corner, deliberately taking up two spaces, half in each of them. Her grin vanished.